Its been clear for ages that many public service cuts are false economies.... as a friend of mine pointed out some time ago, if you cut early intervention & prevention services (which can be relatively cheap & effective), you then enlarge the demand for more expensive (and often mandatory) crisis services....
A new IFS study that looked at closing police stations, suggests, likewise that every £1 saved by closing a location increased social costs by £3!
The UK's record on child poverty is dire (both in absolute terms of worsening & in comparison to other countries).
Looking at the difference depending on number of children in households (and the timing) suggests benefits changes & austerity have a lot to do with this failure.
Moreover, those effected by child poverty often feel the effects throughout their (working) lives... so once again, effectively the last 15 years have seen class war of poor children.
#Budget#UKPolitics This article by Gary Stevenson is so good, please read every word of it.
“Whatever Jeremy Hunt says, traders know the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. And they’re paid millions to bet on it.”
This is what the world is - it is run by a minute elite for a minute elite and the rest of us, the masses, the natural world, we just don’t count. It is a #TragedyOftheNonCommons (will reshare my own piece on this below 1/n)
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 11/n Another key area money flows away from are local councils and social services and, therefore, the young and, again, community. In Birmingham, whose council declared bankruptcy in 2023, provisions for children will be cut by £52m in 2024-25 and £63m in 2025-26; youth services by £2.3m; and eleven community centres are being sold off. As John Harris says:
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 14/n Just realised the title of this really excellent article by Sam Knight is actually perhaps the real theme of this 🧵:
What Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule have Done to Britain
As Sam says, #Austerity is not even talked about so much anymore, but it has just broken the #UK . Please do read the whole piece, so well written, so damning (and I’ve even managed to ignore an aside criticism of Corbyn - usually makes me hate any writer! 😊)
The key to the Tories political strategy is the centrality of impoverishment - we can see it in the enforced poverty for austerity, in the dismantling of social provisions across local government & of course, we can see it in the dismemberment of the cultural sector in this country.
The Tories have impoverished us to capture society's (multitudinous) value(s) for the rich.
They are plunderers of the economy, of society & of culture...
Sadly, after over 7 decades of providing a voice in politics for young people, the British Youth Council is closing.... partly precipitated by the collapse of Body Shop, one of its key partners/funders in recent years.
Its one more ripple effect of austerity & another aspect of the hollowing out of UK civil society.
Our country is being dismantled by a rich elite who care little for anything other than their own (and friends') enrichment.
The IPPR thinks it will take two terms to reverse the damage wrought on the #publicservies by the #Tories.... sadly I think they are under-estimating the damage the Tory strategy has caused the underlying social structures that support the #publicsector.
Don't get me wrong the work needs to start & will certainly take a decade, but the reversal will take decades to finally rid us of the legacy of a toxic decade of #austerity...
The more immediate Q. is: is #KeirStarmer the man to do it????
Another day, another part of the NHS beset by crisis & workforce problems (here the toxic combination of de-funding & de-skilling) as cash-strapped GP practices cannot afford locus GPs & are shifting to 'associate' positions... if you think this looks like the Teaching Assistant move in schools you'd not be wrong.
Its just another aspect of the Tories attack on professions via budget cuts & 'facilitating' their work to be done by the un(der) trained.
You'll be unsurprised that the Institute for Fiscal Studies has confirmed 'extra' NHS spending promised by the Tories was eaten up by inflation;
this is what happens when the focus is no nominal not real (inflation-adjusted) values.
Its been obvious that the defunding of the NHS was at least partly achieved by being publicly obscure (with media collusion) about inflation-adjusted funding & instead trumpeting absolute/nominal funding increases.
More detail (should you want it) on the crisis in local government, its clear link with both #austerity & #Tory attrition against local #democracy.
The most corrosive aspect is the downgrading of local expectations in light of Council failures & budget constraints. As so often the Tories project is to encourage a despair about governance, to push people towards private provision.
Unlikely this will be swiftly reversed by an incoming Labour Govt.
'In the EU & UK policy makers typically view the increase in debt during the crisis as an unfortunate outcome, rather than a beneficial means of softening the impact of the crisis. As a result, as soon as the crisis is over they try to reduce the new higher level of debt through fiscal consolidation rather than stimulating the recovery'.
#Austerity was never necessary it was always a choice for which we paid the price!
The crisis of state #enforcedpoverty (prev. the #costoflivingcrisis) has a very clear #health & #nutrition element... a new report suggests around 15% of UK households are experiencing period of hunger... which is having health effects (being picked up by the #NHS).
And yet, #JeremyHunt is 'considering' further #austerity including #benefits cuts.... it now longer seems extreme or exaggerated to see #Tory politics of the last decade as an extended #classwar!
as @RichardJMurphy points out this morning, the #Tories wrecking campaign against the public sector, by making working conditions so unwelcoming & badly paid is having a continuing effect, with shortage of #teachers, #nurses and other key public #workers.
The game plan is clear:
attack the public services via defunding & stressing the workforce;
use #austerity to claim money is tight, to reduce real wages;
claim: 'we'd like to run better public services, but we just can't get the staff'!
It turns out that we've known since 2012 that the global imposition of #Austerity in the world's response to the crisis imposed by the financial crash of 2008 was justified by an economics paper based on a spreadsheet that contained a couple of coding errors.
If the #Tories knew this, why have they continued to sanctimoniously impose their flawed ideology on the UK for the last decade?
Britain's poor have been the victims of fifteen years of Tory austerity & poor economic management.
But you don't have to believe their critics on this, as Tom Clark sets out here (with links) the state's own data show conclusively the effect of shredding the safety net for the vulnerable & poor.
We have a callous govt. that has wrecked this country for so many; now no-one can now claim they were unaware.
Yet another story of under- (no) investment in vital #infrastructure.
We know that #climatechange is increasing the incidence (and likelihood) of #flooding, yet England's flood defences are increasingly in poor repair & neglected.
While the proportion in bad repair remains below 10% for those communities behind the decrepit barriers/structures, this will be of little comfort.
Once again #austerity & the #Tory wreckers are taking their toll.... its just madness!
I don't often like to toot about this odious hateful man.
However, I need to give him my thanks.
Its 7 years and 7 months since his awful referendum - Britain's most calamitous collective failure.
And today, I've been invited to a Canadian Citizenship ceremony!!🎉🇨🇦
Thank you Canada!
And thank you Nigel - if it wasn't for you, I wouldn't be a valued migrant paying taxes and contributing to a society that welcomes diversity.
Meanwhile in the #LakeDistrict it transpires that #UnitedUtilities have found a cheap way of dealing with the #sewage crisis... they just downgrade the #pollution notifications knowing the Environmental Agency would sign off on the downgrades with no site visits.
Not sure if its the result of #austerity, institutional indifference or corruption... or perhaps all three.
But whatever it is, there #LibDems are right, a criminal investigation is required!
If you've got the time this morning its worth reading @sjwrenlewis on the UK's economic & political decline.
he concludes:
'When the Conservative led Coalition came to power in 2010, it suggested that cutting public spending rather than improving living standards should become the government’s economic priority. Today we are experiencing the inevitable result, a combination of dire public services & fourteen years of relative economic decline.'